Having played with one for a bit, I can confirm it is quite nice indeed, although I personally prefer the “normal” Surface form factor (I will have some words on the Surface Pro 4 soon, seeing as I have been using one for well over a month, and quite a bit of it translates to this new laptop flavor).

It’s going to be interesting to see how Apple responds to this – and to the increasing number of people (like myself) who think they’ve missed their target audience by investing in the (frilly, but rather useless) Touch Bar and skimping on ports.

I don’t watch much TV, but when I do, I tend to go about things systematically, which in turn (given my lack of copious amounts of free time) means I am very picky about what I watch.

Being a fan of traditional history arcs, I’ve given Game of Thrones a wide berth (largely because I have this thing about characters outlasting the ice in my tea) and have been catching up on Elementary (which seems to be mostly OK), lining up my Doctors and dosing myself with Dark Matter until The Expanse comes back on.

This has allowed me to fill quite a few of those late night moments when you’re trying to wind down from work but are still bristling with impatience, but it also made me realize that, even as I prepare for my yearly zero-internet reading binge, the nature of the entertainment I seek has been changing of late.

Most notably, I’ve let most of my side projects languish – which is something I need to fix as soon as possible. Looking back, most of the non-work related coding I’ve been doing turns out to be… work related, either because I am not happy with the default approaches to do something and try to fix them for myself or because I come across some hitherto irrelevant piece of technology that I need to master in some way and I end up doing a little skeleton project to figure it out and make it mine.

There are three main things that contribute to this, in increasing order of annoyance:

The Mac mini has recently gone past its 1000th day without updates, and I am still typing this on my 7-year-old Mid-2010 mini simply because most of my monitors are plugged into it and there is no alternative that is at least as silent and works as smoothly with all my Bluetooth devices.

However much I like building stuff for myself with zero issues on a Mac or Linux, working on Azure solutions for “normal” customers almost invariably involves using Windows and Windows tooling, so I’ve been spending more and more time there and going to and fro is an annoyance (even with the Linux subsystem).

The constant context switches from engagement to engagement make it absolutely impossible to do anything else (besides work) with the amount of depth and commitment I’ve been used to in the past, including (ironically) do more research on the data & AI stuff that I need to excel at to do my job properly.

I’m usually pegged as having high standards, so it’s easy enough to understand that this isn’t sitting well with me at the moment – the hard thing is figuring out what my next step is going to be, so I might as well fold that into this summer’s entertainment.

Like Michael Tsai, I am increasingly wary of Agilebits’ tendency to push people towards their cloud service – and will never move to it, because there is no way I will rely on a company that operates a niche cloud service and doesn’t communicate their roadmap clearly.

Plus my current reading is that they lack firm commitment to not fleece their customers for the sake of moving them to a subscription model – and use that as an excuse to stop updating their software.

PasswordWallet seems like a nice cross-platform alternative, and I’ll keep looking for more.

If you have anything whatsoever to do with academic publishing, you should look into this. Alas, I haven’t drafted anything worth publishing in two decades, but I still have a fondness for the typesetting finesse required.

More than the unveiling, I remember the fallout across the telco industry over the following weeks – a few of us immediately got it and what it entailed for our business models, but the ponderous dinosaurs in charge were reeling for months – if not years.

I’ve been fighting against my usual reticence towards using NodeJS by exploring the intersection between “serverless” (you might remember this post on that topic) and my legendary lack of time. Since most of the emerging indie FaaS runtimes don’t support Python or Go in a relatively painless way, I grudgingly started bringing myself up-to-date on server-side JavaScript and working through the various idioms, and have achieved an uneasy peace with ECMAScript 7 (which, alas, I can’t really use with many libraries yet).

Summer has arrived in earnest (it’s 44C outside), and with it a certain detachment from having sleek, powerful (and warm) computers nestled on one’s lap for extended periods of time, and a renewed interest in using smaller, less imposing machines for photography and other forms of entertainment. That has been taking place mostly outdoors, thanks to the past week’s string of bank holidays (a local peculiarity that effectively puts the entire country on hold a few weeks before Summer break, in a sort of warm-up for doing nothing of any real consequence during August).

I finally managed to get a Surface Pro 4 on loan (more on that later) and it’s interesting to see how the updated design improves upon it – even if I’m squarely on the side of those who think not shipping with USB-C is a mistake.

(Although I’ve already played with the new laptop, I think I still prefer the hybrid form factor because it is ever so slightly more compact.)